The Right Justice Captain Rock

Abstract

The Rockite insurgency, purportedly led by the mythic Captain Rock, enacted a campaign of intimidation and violence which terrorized much of southern Ireland from 1821 to 1824. While the Rockite movement was not the first agrarian redresser movement in Ireland, it was unique for the intensity of its violence, as informed by the political ideology of the movement’s participants, the Rockites. This work argues that the Rockite insurgency was political, as manifested in the Rockites’ assertion of an alternative law and their attacks against police as representatives of the state. The intervention into the historiography of agrarian redresser violence is therefore threefold. First, the politics of the Rockites were informed by both the communal morals of rural Irish society and the popular politicization of the 1790s. Second, the violence enacted in the course of the Rockite movement was not due to lawlessness, but rather an allegiance to the ‘law of Captain Rock’ instead. Lastly, the conflict between the Rockites and the state can be exemplified in their clashes with the police, not only as hostile individuals but also as representatives of the state apparatus. Focusing on County Limerick in the year 1821, this work relies on the little-used State of the Country Papers in the Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers collection.